뉴딜개혁과 대법원

New Deal Reform and the Supreme Court

By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the presidential oath of office on march 1933, the Great Depression seemed to have no bottom in the United States. Roosevelt promised to attack the Depression with action, and action now, and initiated a wide range of measures that expanded federal intervention in the economy and challenged the rule of laissez faire. However, a stalwart force was waiting for the New Deal on its road to reform. The Supreme Court engaged in a series of striking blows to the New Deal legislation, picking apart the constitutionality of many different aspects of the reform plan, and struck down New Deal federal and state redistributive legislation designed to cope with the Depression. The members of the Supreme Court were largely of an era of conservatism, with many of the nine justices throwbacks to the Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover administrations. The Court was composed of four political conservatives, two moderates and three liberals with the two moderates acting as a critical swing votes in many cases. Because of the political leanings of many of the justices, the Court took on a very strong stance against intervention, resisting interference from the Executive and legislative branch. As the Supreme Court rampaged through the New Deal, striking down more than a dozen federal and state laws in eighteen months, Roosevelt administration seriously contrived the court reform. The so-called Court Packing plan came to existence not in one burst but as an evolution of discussions and examinations by the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt tried to persuade the people by saying that the Supreme Court was going beyond its constitutional bounds and was acting as a super-legislative body instead of a judicial body. Roosevelt thought that the older justices were out of touch with what the common person was going through during the Depression. Roosevelt sought to reinvigorate the liberal conscience of the natin by reforming the court system and stated that the legislative approach would be the quickest and most painless way to accomplish this goal. However, events took an interesting turn first on March 29, 1937, in the West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, sustaining a state minimum wage status for women. Further, two weeks after Parrish, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the NLRA in Jones and Laughlin, a decision that took an expansive view of the commerce clause and national power. With this decision, the Supreme Court abandoned its historic devotion to laissez faire, and began the process of constitutionalizing the New Deal. The Constitutional Revolution of 1937 transformed the court s business, ended the reign of laissez faire and legitimated the arrival of the leviathan state. Yet, although the battle was won, the war was lost. Court-packing divided Democrats and undermined middle-class bypartisan support for the New Deal. It welded together a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans that blocked reform in Congress.